Primarily coming from a background in television and documentary filmmaking, for his feature-length effort Last Breath, director/co-writer Alex Parkinson adapts one of his docs of the same name that chronicled this same story of a stranded and submerged saturation diver.  During some underwater pipeline maintenance, a disruption leads to a snagged, and ultimately severed, oxygen supply for the diver.  As his team works to save him, the diver tries to conserve the last of his oxygen while also making himself vulnerable for the hopeful rescue.

Last Breath wants to be procedural popcorn entertainment.  The movie takes its viewers through several steps of preparing and deploying skilled maintenance workers for their dangerous jobs.  These sequences feel painstakingly thorough, but they allow the film to be educational while maintaining the audience’s curiousity.  But with so much emphasis on the process, Last Breath misses moments to develop characters.  For his next film, if he’s planning to adapt another true story, Parkinson has to realize that he’s allowed to take certain liberties with the narrative.  He can be faithful to the events, but he can also afford to deviate from the story to garner more of the audience’s sympathy;  such as with flashbacks that may issue more of a background on the relationships between these seasoned co-workers.  While this may sound like a clichéd way to accomplish this, Last Breath earns a pass because so much of it already is a walking cliché.  However, Last Breath is no more formulaic than Cave Rescue or Thirteen Lives, the biopics about the Thai search-and-rescue endeavours to save a trapped soccer team, and both of those examples were crowd-pleasers.

Last Breath has the same potential. The film stays afloat as a meat-and-potatoes search-and-rescue thriller, equipped with efficient tension and solid performances.  However, this blockbuster could’ve been so much better.

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Addison Wylie: @AddisonWylie